What a Day!

Rocio had planned the day down to the minute. Eleven retired schoolteachers from Duluth, Minnesota, had paid for something called Manhattan in a Day, and Rocio, who had been guiding tours in New York for six years since leaving Lima, fully intended to give them exactly that: the High Line at nine, lunch in Little Italy, a museum in the afternoon and the view from a skyscraper at sunset. She had checked the forecast twice. She had checked the subway service three times. What she had not checked, it turned out, was the calendar.

"What on earth is going on?" she muttered as the group climbed, one careful step at a time, out of the subway station at Columbus Circle. The streets were lined with metal barriers, and thousands of runners in bright shirts were streaming past, cheered on by crowds ten deep. Of all the Sundays in the year, she had brought eleven people in their seventies to Manhattan on the day of the marathon. How could she have missed it? It had been on every bus shelter in the city for a month.

"Well, isn't this something!" said Frank, the group's unofficial leader, a tall man with a voice made for school assemblies. Rocio would have happily let the sidewalk swallow her whole. "I am so sorry," she said. "I did check everything. I really did." The crosstown buses had been diverted, the taxis were going nowhere, and the High Line lay on the far side of a river of runners that showed no sign of drying up.

It was Dorothy, the smallest and oldest of them, who rescued the morning. She unfolded the little stool she carried everywhere, planted it by the barrier and began reading the names that runners had printed on their shirts. "Go, Priya! You've got this, Marcus!" Within ten minutes the whole group had joined in. A man dressed as a banana gave them a thumbs-up. A woman who looked ready to collapse heard her name, straightened her back and ran on. Such joy, Rocio thought, from such a disaster. How had she never noticed how much the city loved a stranger?

By eleven they were edging south, and Rocio had begun to breathe again. Then, at the corner of a wide avenue, they came up against a second wall of people: a neighborhood parade, complete with a brass band, dancers in feathers and a float shaped like an enormous teapot. "You have got to be kidding me!" Rocio said, a little louder than she meant to. But Bev, who had played the trombone in her high school band in 1966, was already clapping along. "A brass band! How wonderful!" And since the parade was heading downtown, and since there was no way through it, they simply joined the back of it and marched twenty blocks in the right direction.

Lunch was a disaster of a different kind. The restaurant in Little Italy had given their table away, and there was not a single free chair in the neighborhood. So they ate pizza standing on the sidewalk, slices folded in half the way Rocio showed them, grease running down their wrists. Frank declared it the best pizza he had eaten in his life, and he said it so loudly that the man behind the counter came out to shake his hand.

At three o'clock the sky turned the color of a bruise. The first drops were the size of coins; the rest arrived all at once. So much for the forecast, Rocio thought, as thunder rolled between the towers. She herded everyone into the nearest doorway, which happened to belong to a tiny Peruvian bakery she had never seen before. The owner, a woman from Arequipa, took one look at twelve dripping people and put the kettle on. Rocio ordered alfajores for everyone and, for the first time all day, stopped apologizing.

The storm lasted an hour. The schoolteachers asked about Lima, about her mother, about why she had come, and Rocio found herself telling them things she rarely told anyone: about the first cold winter, the job cleaning offices, the night course in tourism. Dorothy listened with her chin in her hand. "What a story," she said quietly. "You should be guiding us around your life, not around this island." The museum had long since closed its doors to new visitors, and the skyscraper had suspended its observation deck because of the lightning. Not one of them seemed to care.

When they finally stepped outside, the clouds were breaking up over the Hudson and the wet streets were burning gold. Then someone gasped. Above New Jersey, perfectly clear against the last of the storm, stood a double rainbow. "Would you look at that!" said Frank. "How beautiful," whispered Bev. A delivery driver stopped his bike to take a photo. Rocio, who had seen a thousand sunsets from a thousand viewing platforms, had never seen anything like it.

That evening, back at the hotel, Frank made a speech. "We have been on a great many tours," he said. "Never has one gone so badly wrong, and never have we enjoyed one more." The review appeared online the next morning: five stars, and three words. What a day! In her notebook, under the date, Rocio wrote: Next time, check the calendar. Then, after a moment, she added underneath: Or maybe don't.